“And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK.”
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten — Robert Fulgham
(this article was first published in January, 2014. Seem to have stood the test of time quite well)
Boris Silver of Funders Club had an interesting piece last week named “Reading the Tea Leaves of Venture Capital Today”. In it he’s listing a set of subjects currently capturing investor sentiment:
“This is my informal, not-data-based reading of what the broader tech venture capital community is paying close attention to:
1. Drones
2. Bitcoin
3. Wearables
4. Big Data
5. Crowdfunding
6. Quantified Self
7. 3D Printing
8. The Internet of Things
9. Mobile
10. Virtual Reality
By and large, it’s a very reasonable list of the trends du jour.
Bill Gurley has this saying that ‘you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong’. In fact, one of the unforgivable sins a VC can do is admit he’s ‘herd investing’. The question, is, how do we stop our fascination with trends and ‘hot’ areas from causing us to seek the alpha under the street lamp?
Fortunately, great entrepreneurs show us the way.
New trends emerge through the actions of countless companies and people. Most of the world’s entrepreneurs are not fortunate, or delusional, enough to claim they have set an important trend in motion. However, great entrepreneurs don’t care about trends. Great entrepreneurs are looking for hard problems to solve, or new opportunities to leverage, and they treat technological trends as tools in their path to finding the right solution.
So the real question is, what problems should we invest and work on? What problems are hard, but addressable. Moonshots, not Icarus flights. Problems that will allow you to build a unicorn company, not have you endlessly search for a live one. To paraphrase Bill Gurley, what problems I know can be solved, while everyone else think they can’t?
Below is a list of ten problems I believe are worth tackling, today. You can start working on any one of them today, but none of them is trivial or fully solved. Make concrete, measurable progress in any one of them, and you’ve put a dent in the universe.
- Create an ε-commission financial system (as you may remember from your calculus studies, ε is a number arbitrarily close to zero).
Rebuild the entire financial institutions stack on top of a Bitcoin-like decentralized network. Producing DollarCoins will be a good start. Leverage Big Data and crowdfunding to automate and scale financial decision making and risk assessments.
- Reduce our utility bills by 50%.
Use Internet of Things sensors, Big Data, and Mobile to eliminate our waste and reduce our water, electricity, fuel, and other utilities by 50% or more.
- Break the linkage between poverty and poor education.
More than three quarters of the world’s poor now have access to mobile phones, thus access to iTunesU, Khan Academy, Joytunes, Coursera, OKpanda, and countless other education tools. With Big Data, we can finally treat education as a real science, and optimize the actual learning experience.
- Double the yield of traditional industries like agriculture, government, healthcare, without increasing CAPEX.
There shouldn’t be any low-tech industry today. As an example, in agriculture it was shown that as much as 5x yield improvement is achievable with relatively minor optimizations. Just imagine what life will be like if the DMV would be 5x more productive.
- Empower middle-class workers and improve their productivity so they remain competitive with software and robots.
Accelerating technological evolution is killing middle-class jobs. The rapid evaporation of jobs might be the biggest social challenge we will face in the coming decades. Rather than foregoing humans, we should empower workers through, e.g., augmented and Virtual Reality, to stay competitive, and go up the jobs value chain.
- Help society deal with the impact of immersive computing on the human condition and our ability to form healthy relationships.
Smartphones, and soon, Smartglasses, are changing human relationships and social norms faster than society can cope with, causing much strain and strife. While it will be hubris to claim technology alone can alleviate this stress, it should play a big part.
- Eliminate car accidents without replacing current cars and at sub-$200 price point.
With embedded AI, sensors, and 4G networks, cars become safer and safer. Technologically, it’s quite feasible today to prevent a car accident from happening. The challenge is to bring these capabilities to the mass market, and get rid of car accidents altogether.
- Build an early warning solution for our body. One which continuously monitors our physical and mental health and alerts us as issues emerge.
Beyond Quantified Self, the time is ripe for Diagnosed Self. It is hard to fathom, but in this day and age, we still do not track our body’s state, except in acute situations. Continuously tracking the blood chemistry, hormone levels, or even the bowel movements of millions of people, will open new opportunities and resolve countless health/dietary mysteries.
- Provide media and content creators with sustainable platforms and business models that go beyond reselling their users’ personal data or attention.
It took them a couple of decades, but media publishers, content creators, and performing artists are figuring out how to adapt to the online, mobile, A.D.H.D. world we live in. For the most part, the only monetization vehicle we provided is the banner ad, which is rapidly becoming obsolete as we move to mobile form factors. New monetization models are required, like bitcoin powered micro-payments, or sustainable crowdfunding platforms.
- Personalize manufacturing. Enable the economical personalization and adaptation of the products that surround us.
Why is the chair I’m sitting on not personalized for my body? Neither are my forks and knives, my toothbrush, my phone, and for that matter, any other product I ever used. Can we close the loop between 3D printing, 3D scanning, industrial design and manufacturing logistics and just Personalize Everything?
Alibaba, who may soon IPO for as much as $200B, was built on the back of mass-produced products. Will the next Alibaba be built on the back of one-produced products?
There are countless other problems that emerge the minute you look around. Educate yourself on current technological trends, but don’t be seduced by their voguishness. Look for great products that solve real problems for real people. At the end, that’s all there is to it.
If you enjoyed this piece, please click on the recommend button below ☺. If you’d like to chat further, I’m @eranshir.
